One responsibility of Government is to ensure we have enough housing in the UK to accommodate all those who are resident here.
We also have national planning policy to ensure that what is built is of a suitable standard and is desirable. Further to this, on a local level, we generate a strategy to help guide development so that it is, for example, sympathetic to our local environment. Finally, on an even more local level, we might develop a Neighbourhood Plan to inform developers of what is really important in our villages or where, specifically, we want houses to be built.
The problem with all of this strategy and policy is that unscrupulous developers can run rough-shod over it if the total number of houses available in Wiltshire does not hit a Government-set target. This target, the “5 Year Housing Land Supply” is open to manipulation and can, in most cases, overrule every piece of planning policy we set.
The purpose of the 5 Year Housing Land Supply target (5YHLS) is to provide an indication of whether there are sufficient sites available to meet the housing requirement for the next 5 years. Where strategic policies are more than 5 years old, or have been reviewed and found in need of updating, housing need calculated using the standard method should be used instead.
In essence, if we, as a local authority, are unable to demonstrate that we have enough housing in the pipeline to accommodate residents for 5 years then any development project, no matter how it might conflict with local or national policy, could be granted approval at appeal. In Wiltshire currently we can demonstrate a 4.72 year land supply, short of the 5 year target.
So this is a failing of our Planning system then? A bottleneck meaning we aren’t getting enough applications approved? Nope! We are at the mercy of large developers who are gaming the system.
Some large developers are sitting on a huge portfolio of development sites. A certain percentage of these projects will easily gain planning approval because they tick all the boxes we want from a policy point of view and the sites might even be in the Neighbourhood Plan, meaning they are exactly where the community wants them to be built. These “good”, community supported projects are left to gather dust instead of being built.
By throttling the delivery of “good” developments Wiltshire Council is artificially held back from hitting the 5 Year Land Housing Supply target. If we can only demonstrate a 4.72 year supply then the same developer who owns a “bad” site that fails to meet any of our planning policy requirements can still get an approval for development on appeal because of a “lack of homes” indicated by the failure to hit the 5YHLS target.
The idea behind the 5YHLS was to encourage more house building and on paper that would seem to work – set a target to build enough houses and they will be built. In reality the exact opposite is true. We aren’t seeing enough houses being built because so many projects are being put on ice to allow more difficult sites to be built. Developers are manipulating the supply to ensure we never hit the Government’s target AND the housing that is built is not in the places we want.
In short – this stupid idea is resulting in fewer houses and developments that go against the wishes of local communities. It needs to be scrapped.
At Wiltshire Council’s Strategic Planning Committee last week we had two large developments in Devizes on the table. Both, I am pleased to say, were refused because they failed to meet our local strategy guidance. However, they may well go on to gain approval at appeal due to the failure to meet the Government’s impossible land supply target.
Cllr Philip Whitehead offered a very enlightening speech showing the stupidity of this Government target:
We must force the Government to scrap the 5 Year Housing Land Supply.
Please write to your MP to share your dissatisfaction with it.
